Introduction: Sailing along Intermedial Rivers

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu is Professor of Shakespeare and early modern English literature at Ovidius University of Constanta (Romania). She is the author of Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Re-imagining Western European Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Early Modern Drama and the Eastern European Elsewhere: Representations of Liminal Locality in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), and Shakespeare in the Romanian Cultural Memory, with an introduction by Arthur F. Kinney (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006). She is a Fulbright Fellow (1998-1999), Humboldt Fellow (2009-2010), and SCIEX Fellow (2013-2014). Monica Matei-Chesnoiu is editor of five volumes of essays about Shakespeare in Romania (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2016) and director of the project Shakespeare in the Romanian Cultural Memory (2005-2008). Her main interests incorporate geocriticism and spatial literary studies, including representations of space, place, and geography in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Monica Matei-Chesnoiu is member of the International Committee of Correspondents for the World Shakespeare Bibliography and has served in the Advisory Board of Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance. She has been a PhD supervisor in English Literature since 2014.

Tianhu Hao (PhD, Columbia University) is a Changjiang Distinguished Young Scholar, professor of English and comparative literature, and director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) in the School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. He specializes in early modern English literature, comparative literature, bibliography, manuscript study, and history of the book. In addition to quite a number of Chinese articles, his publications include English essays in ANQ, Comparative Literature Studies, DramArt, European Review, Journal of British & American Studies, The Library, Milton Quarterly, A New Companion to Milton, Spenser Studies, Studies in Bibliography, and Tamkang Review, and a Chinese monograph entitled “Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden”: A Study of an Early Modern English Commonplace Book (2014). His translations include Martin Bernal’s Black Athena vol. 1 (2011), David Kastan’s Shakespeare and the Book (2012), and Hao Ping’s book John Leighton Stuart and China, the last published by Routledge in two volumes, John Leighton Stuart’s Missionary-Educator’s Career in China and John Leighton Stuart’s Political Career in China (2017). He is the editor-in-chief of three book series for Zhejiang University Press: Medieval and Renaissance Translation Series (with three books published so far), Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Renaissance Studies. He has been invited to give talks in China, England, Greece, and Italy. He serves on the editorial board of Multicultural Shakespeare and has recently been invited to join the editorial board of Milton Quarterly. His monograph on the reception of Milton in China is forthcoming.